More on exit interviews, other termination nuts and bolts suggestions

Following my recent post on exit interviews, I ran across some additional useful information (for HR types more than lawyers) on exit interviews and suggestions for implementing terminations, whether voluntary or involuntary (as opposed to making involuntary termination decisions)

First,About.com's Human Resources Blog has this: "How to Improve Exit Interview Participation Rates" (by Beth N. Carvin)

Gosh, being a lawyer and not in the HR trenches, it never occurred to me when I wrote my exit interview post that employees might not want to participate, but apparently that's a significant issue.

Exit interviews are one of the best ways to get true and honest feedback from employees. The downside is that it takes time to build up a significant amount of data from exit interviews.

Increasing your participation rate, however, can help you get greater amounts of actionable information faster from your exit interviews. . .

Research shows that the average response rate for paper and pencil exit interviews is approximately 30-35 percent. This means that a company with 2000 employees and a 15 percent turnover rate would expect to receive about 100 completed exit interviews per year. At this participation level, the organization is getting exit feedback from just five percent of the total employee population.

With just a little extra effort, you should be able to double that response rate. Read more

The next item is also from About.com's Human Resources Blog: "Employment Ending Checklist"(by Susan M. Heathfield)

Employees leave your organization for good reasons and bad reasons. On the positive side, they find new opportunities, go back to school, retire or land their dream job. Less positively, they are fired for poor performance or poor attendance or experience a layoff because of a business downturn. In each instance, you need an employment termination checklist to help the employee exit process go smoothly. Read more

I would add a couple of more suggestions to her list.

First, depending on the nature and extent of the employee's use of company information systems, efforts to secure and preserve information on the employee's workstation or laptop may be in order (hard drives are cheap, and swapping one out may preserve valuable evidence with respect to an employee leaving under questionable circumstances).

Second, if the employee has signed a confidentiality and/or noncompete agreement of any kind or been exposed significantly to confidential information subject to a company confidentiality policy, a written reminder of such obligations is probably a good idea both as a preventive measure and as possible future evidence if needed.

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